'The Brutalist' Review

The Brutalist had its North American Premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.

The more that The Brutalist progresses along its 215-minute track, the more it becomes evident that co-writer/director Brady Corbet sees himself in his protagonist, László Toth (Adrien Brody), the overlooked genius who seeks to reform modern architecture away from its ugly preconceptions and must put himself through the wringer to prove the doubters. A later scene sees Toth introducing the design for his wildly ambitious project, a sort of shrine to a capitalist’s deceased mother. It’s going to house a worship center, gymnasium, library, auditorium, and several pathways lined with marble and concrete. There’s never been anything like it, which is why, while curious and attracted to the ambition, the investors are trepidatious about its feasibility.

One could imagine Corbet employing the persuasiveness of Toth’s design and vision in the pitch meetings for the film as a whole. With a runtime eclipsing that of any American feature in decades, photography in VistaVision that is projected in some combination of 70mm (Note: The projection I saw at the press and industry screening at the Toronto International Film Festival was in 35mm), an overture, an intermission, and an epilogue, nothing about The Brutalist screams commerciality. But like Toth and his monument, every dollar that Corbet’s behemoth sacrifices at the box office will be used to better the art form. The only currency that matters in cinema is the experience you carry with you long after the viewing.

Such a grandiose production must also house a grandiose story, with Corbet and his often co-writer and partner Mona Fastvold saddling themselves with nothing less than weaving a rich tapestry of the modern American experience. In a nearly identical vein to what has made Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films filled with eternal beauty, Corbet identifies that the truest Americans were those carried by steamship through Ellis Island. Toth snakes his way through the bowels of the ship, the foreboding score and canted angle of the Statue of Liberty signifying the joys and dangers of what’s to come in his new life.

Loneliness is his most potent quality, as his wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy) are still trapped in post-WWII Eastern Europe. The American Dream is more about the freedom to assimilate than the freedom to be yourself, which is why Toth’s successful Philadpehian cousin (Alessandro Nivola) has westernized his last name to Miller, married a Catholic girl, and reluctantly talks about their upbringing in the Old World. Toth can’t blend in so easily, with his features (an in-joke is made about Toth’s nose being broken) and accent too recognizable.

Collaboration, conflict, and compromise are the tools to his success, each made all the more possible with the financial backing of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). It doesn’t matter if his interest in Toth’s work is genuine or just a temporary distraction to amuse himself with. His money is very real, and so are his ambitions for Toth. He parades him around his socialite friends at his swanky gatherings, using Toth’s struggles as conversation starters.

With his previous two features, Corbet has trained his sights on the costs of being someone and creating something. While the deal Toth makes is not as literally Faustian as it is in Vox Lux, he does have to tear pieces of himself away for the project. Brody is tremendous, reaching a new dramatic height after years of only gaining notice within the whimsically stacked casts of Wes Anderson. The comparisons to his work in The Pianist, both in terms of what’s on the screen and how it be rewarded, are appropriate. He buries himself within his work, with his creation destined to become his salvation.

What Corbet is crafting is just as alluring, with Lol Crawley’s cinematography ranging from hauntingly claustrophobic to sweepingly beautiful. Even in the gloomy Pennsylvania countryside, a place where the frost tinges the corners of the frame, he and production designer Judy Becker make those slabs of steel and concrete pour out with Toth’s soul. With the added time, each scene flows with more freedom and weight, all of them simultaneously epic and intimate as the camera glacially passes through the years.

This is a full-course cinema meal, requiring an afternoon to consume and much longer to digest. It’s easy to savor every moment of it in real-time because of its boundless beauty, and just as easy over time thanks to its long lingering themes on the ideals that modern America convinced itself it was built upon.